Then you don’t belong in EVE. EVE is a merciless game that is supposed to ruin your fun and make you quit, unless you are strong enough to win. If EVE doesn’t have a significant percentage of players having no fun and quitting then something is badly wrong. Perhaps WoW is more your style, a game where fun is guaranteed and everyone gets to win?
As for your complaints about calling AFK cloakers weak, I’ll note that you are the one who keeps rejecting the one guaranteed solution to AFK cloaking: remove local. If local no longer exists then nobody will bother AFK cloaking anymore, because AFK cloaking exists for the sole purpose of counting the absurd effectiveness of local as a warning tool for farmers. But I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the solution you reject is the one that results in farmers losing their safety tool, while you praise any anti-cloaking suggestion that removes the threat of AFK cloakers while keeping local intact.
So Farmer Joe who makes sure space is clear before undocking is doing it right. it’s not ‘too easy’ or 100% safe as anyone could come at any time, and if he does not keep a watchful eye, fly appropriately and take action when hostiles show up then he will be a killmail in short order.
That’s absurd. With local the risks are essentially zero, and “fly appropriately” is an absolute minimum level of competence that even a bot can figure out. You might as well talk about how Farmer Mike faces such immense difficulties and risks because he has to “fly appropriately” and avoid pressing the self destruct button, and failing to do so will quickly make him a lossmail. The only thing that adds any meaningful risk and makes nullsec farming above Farmer Mike level is the ability to stay logged in while AFK and reduce the effectiveness of local.
It’s when Mouthbreather Bob turns on a cloak and sits safely in space forever more regardless of the active players attempting to find and evict him that it’s a problem.
Why is this a problem? If you are strong and not a weak victim (or RMT botter) then Hero Bob’s presence is irrelevant to you. It’s just a name in local. Hero Bob only matters if you are a RMT botter or a fail-tier alliance with the collective player skills of a RMT bot and no ability to fight back against even the weakest threats. So, again, I have to wonder why you persistently object to something that only hurts bad players and RMTers.
I don’t object to the removal of local. I reject the assumption that removing it will fix cloaks.
Cloaks have far more issues than just afk camping. AFK camping is just a symptom, one that should not be possible in the face of active hunters in system.
Anything you would want to do cloaked is worth opposing. That’s basic EVE. Preserving your titan because you don’t have support, info gathering, or even scaring farmers. It’s all worth opposing. Yet the pilot is so safe he can go afk all day long with no risk of danger to himself. And you have the audacity to call the other guy weak.
Yes, AFK-cloaking is a symptom of local being way too good as an intel-source. I don’t see anyone complain about cloaks in any other part of Eve except for sov-null.
According to arguments by the pro-afk crowd in this thread, Making cloaks detectable At All completely breaks:
Capitals
Wormholes
Intel Gathering
Bio-Breaks
Hunting
Watching Gates
…and every other ATK use of a cloak, ever.
If you can’t see how that indicates cloaks need adjusting, no one can help you.
Yes, changing cloaks so you can find them while cloaked will be a huge nerf to their use in all parts of space and for all activities. Especially wormhole-space will be hit hard with that change, as is hunting.
Cloaks currently aren’t overpowered nor do they need that massive mechanics-change just so you can farm in peace.
The claim was made that certain activities would be destroyed by making cloaks at all discoverable.
Like, less than a minute every few hours, or just getting on grid within 100k.
Aparrently the onus to move your ship once in a while when people are actively hunting you makes the game utterly impossible. If you can’t see how that speaks of a problem, you are beyond help.
To say it would be a huge nerf depends on how discoverable they were to become. If an alert pilot can easily dodge hunters, then that’s not a big nerf to ATK cloaking, even less so if the means to do that takes significant time, effort, skill or equipment.
Would it be a nerf? Yeah, sure. However, it’s not hard to see they need a nerf. Just look at wormholes where they have become ubiquitous. Take away local and it would likely become nearly a must have on every ship in the game. I don’t have a problem with doing whatever to local, but regardless when you get a module that reaches “Must Have” status, you likely have a module with balance problems. Consider that over the years they have nerfed MWD’s, Afterburners, Tracking Enhancers, Shield Hardeners, and dozens more basic function modules for that very same reason.
The takeaway from nearly a decade of participation in this thread is that the problem isn’t AFK Camping. It’s the cloak itself. The more people try to defend it the more obvious it becomes. There are too many examples of supposedly vital elements of gameplay that actually break if cloaks are even remotely discoverable, and that’s a problem. Those vital game play elements deserve opposition, and cloaks prevent any and all opposition other than passively tolerating their presence.
I still like the idea of a Sov module that combines a Sensor Array with an Accelerator Gate.
It uses (technobabble) to see if there is anything resembling an active Cloaking Device in the system. And then it flings you off in the general direction of that signal. You end up somewhere on grid with the ship, and then you wander around with your drones orbiting or your Smartbombs pulsing, until you manage to reveal them. Or if they’re awake, they warp away and leave you to wander aimlessly in empty space.
Give it a timer, so you can’t spam it every few minutes and follow the spy from one bookmark to another. We’ll say it takes time to survey the system looking for the new location. That way spies can still gather their Intel, but the AFK trolls will eventually be caught and killed.
And since this is clearly the best solution for “the Cloak Problem”, then I humbly request that CCP name the meta / faction version after me! =)
The assumption is that “discoverable” means “discoverable in a useful amount of time/circumstances”, not “once per year you can have a 0.00001% chance to find a cloaked ship”. Therefore the argument is against the actual mechanic that is likely to be implemented, not the toned-down version that you’re using as a decoy to trick people into supporting your farming safety buff.
Aparrently the onus to move your ship once in a while when people are actively hunting you makes the game utterly impossible.
A mechanic that can be defeated by moving your ship once in a while is a pointless waste of developer time. So either:
You are lying again, you don’t care about hunting active players, and simply want to keep people from staying logged in while AFK and making local a less effective defense for farmers.
or
Your proposal would not stop at “move your ship once in a while”, and would necessarily escalate to a much higher threat to the cloaked ship so that you could possibly accomplish something.
Take away local and it would likely become nearly a must have on every ship in the game.
No it wouldn’t. Cloaks are a must-have in wormholes because stations do not exist (and citadels are much less available) and you need to bring an alternative way to “dock”. The small benefits that a cloak would give “every ship in the game” are easily obtained by docking, without having to spend a high slot and suffer the cloak penalties.
Nope. Farmers don’t matter. RMTers don’t matter. Renter trash don’t matter. There are lots of “players” in EVE who do not matter, whose existence is grudgingly tolerated until they finally ragequit and go back to WoW. And, not surprisingly, the vast majority of opposition to cloaks is from people who want farming to be safer and more efficient. IOW, people who do not matter.
(And, from an alternative point of view, the only people who matter are the developers and they have explicitly stated that AFK cloaking will not change until local is nerfed.)
Wait, you mean you just can’t deal if you have to contend with opposition? God forbid there be an effective way to hunt you down if you go entirely brain dead and refuse to even try to be aware of your surroundings and stay in one place regardless of the presence of an active enemy hunting you down.
Your claims of others being weak are really weak compared to the urine dribbling down your leg at being opposed in even a minor way.
You know who whines about Cloaks? Null Sec care bears.
You know who doesn’t whine about Cloaks. Wormhole care bears.
The difference… One of them has the luxury of Local telling them whether it’s safe to step foot outside. The other is working under the assumption that it’s dangerous out there, and behaves accordingly.
Getting rid of Local will most definitely quell a lot of these tears. Once you take away the security blanket, you won’t have as many people crying about “he’s been sitting there all day long, he must be AFK.”
Wormholes have a lot of other differences too, like the guy who may or may not be cloaking next to you actually turning into a supercap fleet.
On the other hand, maybe this is part of why wormholes have the lowest population despite the highest rewards.
I’d argue that whatever you are doing in a wormhole, you should be able to proactively prevent enemies from gathering intel and preparing large scale (such as they are in wormholes) assaults. There should be a contest, not just if you fit a cloak your life is now completely worry free unless you are an idiot.
I’ve been living in wormhole-space for nearly a decade now. Clearing out scouts is not actually too difficult. You just have to have patience and work together with your corp. Also, planning ahead for tactics under different situations will also help.
Nobody in W-space is asking for cloaks to be changed. You are just trying to justify nerfing cloaks so you can farm in peace.
No, you once again didn’t bother reading my post, probably out of sheer stubborn refusal to admit that your farmer safety plan could possibly have any flaws. The issue is not being opposed. In fact, I have specifically suggested opposing cloaked ships (by flying in large fleets and killing any cloaker dumb enough to engage) as a way to counter them.
The issue is that you are not going to be satisfied with minor opposition, you’re going to keep making demands until you get your 100% safe farming. If CCP gives you a probe system that lets you slowly locate a cloaked ship you’ll complain about how cloaks still give you invulnerability because you can warp away before tackle lands. If CCP gives in and shortens the scan time you’ll complain about how you have to waste time probing even if you aren’t sure there’s a cloaked ship to find, and demand that cloaked ships appear on d-scan. And now you have your 100% safety for farmers, since you can spam 1000km d-scan constantly and warp out the moment a cloaked ship appears.
There should be a contest, not just if you fit a cloak your life is now completely worry free unless you are an idiot.
Your life is worry-free, but it is also accomplishment-free. Fitting a cloak on any random ship (IOW, not a covert ops cloak) only gives you the ability to “dock” in WH space. While “docked” you can not run PvE content, you can not engage PvP targets, you can not travel through the WH chain, etc. If you actually want to do anything in a WH you have to deactivate your cloak and accept risk. This is why WH players do not whine about cloaks.
Glad you admit that cloaks are so safe as to render you worry free. Accomplishment is another matter, and depends on what the cloaker intended.
Was he gathering intel? He’s doing it in complete safety.
Was he hiding a Titan from hunters? One button push and your Titan may as well be docked.
Does he want to degrade the value of a system, either by reducing the farmers in system or by forcing compromised fits, multiple people, etc… Once again unstoppable and risk free.
None of your proposals have anything to do with this. A player actively gathering intel would continue to be 100% safe, because they can warp between safespots faster than you could detect and engage them. It’s virtually impossible to catch a ship even without a cloak, as long as that ship is willing to spend the entire time running away and doesn’t care about PvE or engaging PvP targets directly (as an intel ship is happy to do).
The “intel” issue is clearly a decoy to bait people into supporting your real goal: more safety for farmers.
Was he hiding a Titan from hunters? One button push and your Titan may as well be docked.
Cloaks on titans are an entirely separate issue, one that has no effect on the vast majority of players. If this is an issue you genuinely care about then the solution is to handle this one extreme outlier by making cloaks impossible to fit on titans.
Does he want to degrade the value of a system, either by reducing the farmers in system or by forcing compromised fits, multiple people, etc… Once again unstoppable and risk free.
It is only risk free if the people being degraded are pathetic victims. Strong alliances are already taking the appropriate counters to an AFK cloaker even in the absence of one currently in local, because those counters also deal with things like an interceptor gang jumping in and rushing the PvE sites. The mere presence of the AFK cloaker in local has zero effect on the system. To have any effect the cloaker must come back from being AFK and deactivate their cloak to engage, at which point the normal PvP risks apply.
The only time AFK cloaking is unstoppable and risk-free is when you’re talking about players who don’t deserve to exist in EVE: RMTers, and alliances whose collective skill is less than a RMT bot. Those players know they suck, and the only defense they know is staying docked at all times when a name appears in local. And at that point you might as well complain about how the self destruct button is overpowered and risk free, because forcing your target to press their self destruct button is really effective against the dumbest and most pathetic “players” in EVE.